


lost stars.

by krysalla



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Blood and Injury, Bonding, Death, Eventual Happy Ending, Eventual Smut, F/M, Feelings, Foreshadowing, Friends to Lovers, Slow Burn, Tenderness, Touch-Starved, Violence, farming and hearding yeehaw!, i was on wookieepedia a lot., nerf herder reader
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-13
Updated: 2020-01-13
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:21:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22238545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krysalla/pseuds/krysalla
Summary: You live on Eadu, a small planet with nothing of note except for its Imperial kyber refinery and the never-ending rain, as a nerf herder who desperately wants to leave and get a glimpse of the sky that has been hidden from you your entire life. The only marked importance about you is that your brother is a Resistance fighter pilot, your husband is a gambler and the distrust your village has had for you and your family since you were born. Then, one day, a Mandalorian washes up on your front door, injured and looking for his bounty. After his arrival, your whole world is shaken to the core, and you're sure you will never be able to go back to what your life was like before him.
Relationships: Din Djarin/Reader, The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/Reader
Comments: 6
Kudos: 38





	lost stars.

**Author's Note:**

> this series takes place before the events of a new hope through to the end of the first season of the mandalorian!

You lug pelts of dyed nerf wool and packages of nerf meat onto the table of a Twi’lek trader, Cham. He’s one of the few people who can provide an actual income as he owns one of the biggest import and export business in the southern hemisphere of Eadu. Some of the herders don’t come to him for exactly one reason: he’s an outsider, and one with intricate ties to the Empire. To them, he can not be trusted despite the fact that his fate of working in the Empire’s kyber refinery was forced upon him and he had no option in the matter. You are one of the smart ones who do business with him. You get far more from him than any of the small traders in your village, so the half a day it takes you to get to his base of operations is well worth it. 

He smiles at the load you bring him but scrunches his nose in disgust when the wind catches the scent of the nerf. Cham doesn’t deal with nerfs daily so he never gets fully accustomed to it. 

“Is this everything?” He counts your load and ticks off information on a tablet and proceeds to have someone count through the pelts.

You wait patiently as he calculates the total in his head. This season has been kind to you. There wasn’t an influenza this year and a few of your nerfs even had twins. A healthy blessing to hopefully follow you into next year. “Yes.”

***

The air is changing, you have felt it and so have your nerfs. They bleat and bleat until you think your ears might bleed at the sound of them. Each day it gets harder for you to wrangle them out to feed and back into the stables, and you can’t blame them—for the past week, you’ve been on high alert for the start of storm season. 

You check to see that the nerfs are locked securely in the barn. The last thing you need is to lose one out in the storm; you wouldn’t be able to take the hit of that financially. It already costs too much as it is to keep your farm going by yourself but with the debts you owe, that’s the real killer. 

Under the dull yellow light of your lantern, something reflects the light back into your eyes. You startle at it and begin walking away until you hear the groan. It isn’t unusual to come across Imperial weapons and waste on your property, after all you live downhill from one of their many kyber refinery bases on this planet. You’ve learned to avoid anything that may wash up. You like to keep your plausible deniability when the stormtroopers come marching across your farm after whatever incident occurred at the refinery for damage control.

“Hello?”

A hand grabs your ankle and yanks you down to the ground and the other points a blaster at your face. The T-line visor on the helmet instills more fear into your blood than any amount of stormtroopers could ever accomplish. They can’t shoot worth a damn, but he is a Mandalorian. He is a force to be reckoned with. 

He says just a single word. _Help._ It’s not a question or an attempt to plead with your humanity, it’s a command. You’ve only ever heard stories about them, their bloodlust and warrior code. They are dangerous and will kill anyone that gets in their way. His armor has scorch marks from a shootout. The villagers don’t use blasters and don’t have any weapon more advanced than knives. It must have been stormtroopers. 

He’s armed to the teeth: blasters strapped to his thigh and side, a rifle slung around his back and gauntlets with what looks like a flamethrower and a whipcord. Your options are limited: hide him in your hut for when the stormtroopers come or leave him out there and let the goons take him. Either way, there’s a chance that they will see it like you are involved with whatever he got himself into. You will deal with the consequences of this later. You roll up your sleeves and try to ignore the blaster being pointed at you. 

He’s heavier than he looks, even with the amount of weaponry and armor attached to him, and he’s no help to you when you try to pull him up. The moment he puts weight on his right ankle, he falls back to the ground, nearly taking you down with him. You cut the palm of your left hand when you catch yourself from the fall. 

“Mandalorian, you need to help me out.” You push yourself back up and bite the inside of your cheek when you examine your cut. The rock has cut you deep, tearing through the first and second layer of skin. It’s going to scar and possibly leave some kind of nerve damage, you don’t need a medical droid to tell you that.

You take a deep breath and pull yourself together, fighting back the formation of tears and the gasp that gets caught in your throat. You have a job to do.

“I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is barely above a whisper and distorted from the modulator and the thrumming of the rain. The Mandalorian holsters his blaster. “Please, help.”

You try again, circling around to the right side of his body and hoisting him up with one hand under his arm and the other on his waist. He leans against you and breathes heavily. Your home has never seemed so far away than right now. It’s only a few hundred feet away but with his ankle and how he seems to be swaying, it will be the longest walk of your life. 

Each step sends a shock of pain through him and with each one, the longer he has to stop to catch his breath. He wheezes through it and when you reach the small divot in the path to your home, he nearly falls again, but you catch him. You bite back your own pain when the cut on your hand catches on the edge of his pauldron. It’s covered in blood at this point and your fingers had struggled to find a grip on the pauldron. You pivot towards him and catch his waist in your other hand, “Come on. We’re almost there.”

By the time you reach your hut, you’re practically dragging him. You aren’t sure if he’s passed out, but he’s still breathing. You try to put him down on the bed carefully but it’s hard with the way your arms ache and shake from carrying him all that way. You lose your grip on him and he drops unceremoniously onto your bed. He groans. Good. A sign of life from him finally.

“Do what you need to do,” he wheezes, “but don’t take off my helmet.”

Your first priority right now is to patch up your own hand. It’s an easy process in theory—clean the wound and spread bacta onto it—but your nausea and low tolerance for pain get in the way. The sooner you get it over with the quicker it will heal.

When you’re all patched up, only suffering now from teary-eyes and a small bite on the inside of your cheek, you begin the task of disarming him and carefully removing the armor. From what you can tell, the only piece or beskar he has is his helmet, the rest of his armor is a washed-out red with splotches of tan and blue. When it comes to his clothes, you have no idea where to start or what to do. You know he said do what you have to but it still feels like an invasion of privacy. 

“Hey, where does it hurt?”

The Mandalorian groans and mumbles in a foreign language. Great. 

You poke and prod and push up his sleeves and pull his shirt up. His chest and left arm are both swollen and bruised and his arm has a noticeable bump along the outside. 

There’s not much you can do for broken bones, but you do your best with a splint. You can’t do anything for his ribs and his ankle hopefully isn’t broken. You can’t tell how bad the sprain is or if anything is broken, and without a medical droid around, you won’t be able to tell until he wakes up. 

***

He wakes up sometime in the night. He panics once he realizes his armor is gone and that his helmet might be too, but the weight of the beskar still sits on his head. There’s not much he remembers, just the shoot out with the stormtroopers and losing his footing and falling and sliding down the face of the mountain. He dragged himself two miles before seeing the lights of a hut but collapsed before he could reach it. No. He remembers you. You helped him. 

Din looks around and sees you, hair in a loose braid and a sad expression on your face, only illuminated by a lantern at your side. You work on a leather jacket, stitching a rip at the shoulder. He has no idea what to make of you. He knows that most of the population of the village are farmers and traders, but there’s also the Imperial occupation. He’s seen populations corrupted and turned to side with the Empire. 

“Thank you.”

You peer at him and only shrug, “Don’t mention it.” You carefully place the jacket on the seat of the rocking chair you had just occupied and disappear behind the curtain separating this room from another. 

Din just barely makes out the insignia on the jacket—the symbol of the Resistance—and breathes a sigh of relief. 

He props himself up on his elbows to get a better view of his surroundings but there isn’t much to look at. A few baskets of clothing and a Resistance pilot helmet sitting on your desk, a simple rug and a small portrait of a couple on their wedding day. Presumably yours, but he can’t make the faces out on it clearly. The rocking chair in the corner and a small pale blue blanket—perhaps made for a child—draped over the back of it and wool in a basket next to the chair waiting to become a new blanket or sweater. No, the blanket is too small for a child, maybe for a toddler or an infant. An old keepsake? There’s no sign of a child living there. No toys and no proud displays of pictures painted by one. The house is too quiet and too clean. There are small hints of who you are throughout the room, but nothing tangible or real that he can gather and his inferences can only take him so far with the information available to him. 

You part the curtain and smile at him. “You ought to be more careful. You’re gonna be out of commission for a while. Your ankle is sprained, but not too bad from what I can tell. Some swelling but there's no bruising which is very good news for you. Ankle fractures are a pain to heal. Your arm and a few of your ribs, on the other hand, are broken.” You set down a tray of food and water on the side table as well as a pouch of bacta. “There isn’t much I can do for you besides a splint for your arm. Everything is just going to heal on its own.”

He doesn’t answer. There isn’t anything he can say. 

“So, are you going to tell me why a bounty hunter washed up on my doorstep?” You sit next to him on the bed and take his right arm, the one that isn’t broken, into your hands and roll up his sleeve, “Is this okay?”

He nods. “I have a bounty. Someone in the village.”

You open the bacta packet and begin smoothing it over the various cuts and scrapes over his forearm. He can only stare. It’s been a long time since he was touched this softly, not to mention the skin to skin contact. He’s used to a barrier. 

“Who is it? I’m sure I can direct you to them. Your tracking fob was crushed.”

“Cratloc. Shriv Cratloc.”

Your hands stop smoothing bacta on his wounds and he can see you stiffen. “I’m afraid you won’t be getting a payday, Mandalorian.” You draw your hands into your lap and wipe your hands clean on a small dishrag. He watches your eyes go glassy. You start carefully, fingers tapping against your thigh, and with a low voice, “Shriv is dead.”

“What?”

“He died last night.”

The air becomes palpable around you from the turn the conversation has taken. You continue your task of playing nurse, gingerly taking his broken arm into your hands, and undo the splint. The sharp intake of breath surprises him—he didn’t quite expect something so simple to hurt like that—and if you heard it, you ignored the noise and smear the bacta over where he assumes the break is. 

“It won’t heal it in one application, but it will help speed up the healing process.”

He curls his hand into the sheets when you put the splint back on. You’re too calm considering you’ve just buried your husband and found out that there was a bounty on his head, in fact, you didn’t seem surprised by that fact in the slightest. You knew about his debts and probably shared in them. He was too young to die of natural causes, but maybe not on this planet where the cold and rain seem to bite into its occupants. Shriv obviously had some enemies, and all Din knows about him is the gambling debts that came with the bounty puck he received from Greef Carga. Maybe someone got overzealous and decided that killing him would be better than paying for a bounty.

“What killed him?”

Your eyes flash to him as you put the bacta packet back on the tray you brought in, “Why do you ask?”

Din straightens up. Your behavior has done a complete one-eighty. He wonders, briefly, if it is grief or the rashness of his question, “He was my bounty.” 

His answer only amplifies that change in you.

“And he was _my_ husband. I fail to see how the two can even compare,” you stand, all concerns of carefulness and softness gone as you rise from the mattress, jostling him and sending shocks of pain through his body as his injuries are jostled. On the way to the door with heavy footsteps, you grab the leather jacket you were working on, and part the curtain. You pause, halfway into the main room and the bedroom and turn to him, “It’s best not to pry into things that are none of your business, Mandalorian.” 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! kudos and comments are greatly appreciated!


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